Delaware River Basin Commission listens as it weighs new natural gas drilling rules

Martin Griff/The Times of TrentonThe Delaware River at sunset near the Statehouse in Trenton.

TRENTON — In an emotional hearing today on proposed regulations for natural gas drilling near the Delaware River, there was consensus on only one issue: The proposed rules don't get it right.

Environmental groups said drilling threatens water quality. Landowners said the risk is overstated and that the real risk of the proposed regulations is that they would take away their property rights and keep an economic energy from going in a depressed area.

The proposed rules that seem to have no fans come from the Delaware River Basic Commission, a federal-Interstate compact agency that monitors water quality around the Delaware River in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. The water in the basin is used by some 15 million people, including half the population of New York City.

The DRBC has imposed a moratorium on drilling in its part of the massive underground Marcellus Shale formation until the rulemaking process is complete.

The organization's executive director, Carol Collier, said the organization's board will announce next week whether it will extend the comment period, which is to close March 16. She said the commission will also announce then whether it will schedule additional hearings closer to Philadelphia and New York City, as some anti-drilling activists have requested.

Before today's day of hearings in New Jersey's state capital — which followed daylong hearings in Pennsylvania and New York state — the commission had already received comments from some 1,700 people.

Natural gas drilling has become a boom industry in the Marcellus Shale, including in stretches of Pennsylvania not monitored by the DRBC. The agency expects that 18,000 or so wells could eventually be drilled on some 2,000 sites throughout the parts of Pennsylvania where it has jurisdiction.

Landowners in parts of northeast Pennsylvania regulated by the commission said they want to join the boom to create jobs, keep their family farms and produce a kind of domestically produced energy that burns relatively cleanly.

For some of them, the idea of an un-elected body regulating what happens on their rural land — and with the input of people from distant cities and suburbs — is troublesome.

"We just heard somebody from Bricktown, New Jersey, telling me what should happen to my property in Wayne County, Pennsylvania," said John Woodmansee, a landowner in Buckingham Township. "This room is full of strange things. We need the gas."

Like others, he called on the DRBC to come up with less stringent rules.

Several landowners said the regulations are so restrictive that no drilling would be allowed.

As written, they govern water withdrawals, well pad siting and wastewater disposal, and require drilling companies to post a bond of $125,000 per well to cover the plugging and restoration of abandoned wells and the remediation of any pollution

Environmental groups and their supporters — most of them not from Northeast Pennsylvania — criticize the regulations as too lax, and giving too much power to the gas-drilling industry to regulate itself.

They say the DRBC should hold further hearings and wait years until there are further studies on the effects of drilling — which uses "fracking," a technique that injects water, sand and toxic chemicals underground to break up shale and release gas — on air and water quality.

Jim Walsh, an organizer with Food and Water Watch, said the issue at stake isn't property rights.

"We are talking about our drinking water here, something people need to live," he said. "Don't forget that."

The DRBC'S Collier said there's no timeline for when the commission will decide whether to impose the regulations. With representatives of four states and the federal government, coming up with any rules could be a political struggle.

But before the hearing, she said there are indications from the commenters that the proposed regulations strike the right balance.